As someone in that group, I don't know if I see any evidence of this generational effect. The Internet is just the latest battleground for ideologies that have always existed: consumer protection, national security, business freedom, market solutions. The same sort of thinking guides the people who call for backdoors now, who called for banning encryption in the 1990's, who called for easier access to credit card and other transactions in the 1970's, etc.
Businesses that create technological products are always going to be entities the government can control. And regulators will never be encryption utopians. They'll always be mild pragmatists willing to make compromises whose values fall moderately left or right of center on the authoritarian scale.
[0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point out.
Encryption is such an obvious target because it enables nothing besides hiding. Society/government can never see the value in anything that serves to keep society/government out of individuals' business, even though the former only exists on the proceeds of individual autonomy.
So in essence, the crypto/software war is self-defense against govermment/society. Not in the sense of overthrowing or repudiating the entire concept, but in the sense of holding the Schelling point of freedom of speech/thought versus a society/government that, through the same information technology advancement, would otherwise seek to subject them to totalitarian regulation (even if by the majority).
A little off topic, but I think it is time for the USA to do a "let's go to the moon" type effort to make digital systems secure and protect privacy. I know this is a long shot though: it would take re-purposing the capabilities of the NSA (and the FBI, etc.) to making digital communication secure. Obviously this requires NO BACK DOORS, and more research into digital security. There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA and it would be good to have them working on helpful tasks like securing the Internet for businesses, the government, and individuals - and not waste time on spying on innocent people. In the 1990s the NSA and FBI did a lot of good work in this direction, but then the bogus 'war on terror' pushed them off course.
What if the entire premise of privacy being beneficial is flawed? What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break?
I don't want more regulations for startups that want to analyze my genome, nor do I want to become an expert in internet security just to browse the web. Writing software is already difficult as it is, and the requirement to protect privacy makes it even more difficult and risky.
The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible.
My wife has an ex-boyfriend who went to prison. She was pretty terrified when there was an internet trail to our current home address (which I have since closed). Largely because of our Macy's wedding registry which showed up when you searched her name, which had my name, and there's only one of me in the US.
We know he found the registry because he emailed her about it. But he had to be a bit technical to connect the rest of the dots, and I don't think he did.
Instead of getting rid of the bad guys (or preferably get rid of incentives that motivate actions you don't agree with), you seem to be suggesting that we should hide from them. I can imagine this would lead to a world with more bad guys (because no effort exists in preventing them), a lucky minority of people who have the skills to remain hidden/unidentified (not mentionning the constant worry and utilitarian trade-offs) while letting those who don't have this chance be vulnerable to this threat.
What I hear is "let's keep marijuana consumption illegal, as long as it's easy for my fortunate white self not to get caught smoking it". No wonder so many visible minorities go to jail for crimes that white people commit just as often, ethnicity is hard to conceal. I have yet to see a movement helping black people look white so that society treats them more fairly.
People believing such a thing probably don't understand the fundamental nature of reality. Everything forms a web of causality; all your actions spread outwards at the speed of light, affecting everything else around you. Quite often one can correlate back those effects to their original cause. This is what science does - figuring out new ways to correlate observations with their causes. Progress of technology only means we're getting better at it. I don't see how you can revert back to the pre-industrial levels of privacy without rolling back the industrial revolution.
When people serve their time we let them out of prison. But it also doesn't mean people may not still be afraid of them because of what they've done in the past. You cannot lock someone up just because someone is afraid of them. "If they do it again he will go to prison" isn't exactly comforting.
As my father would happily point out, you cannot always lock someone up for being an asshole. Not all asshole behavior is prison worthy. But that doesn't mean that I want to have to endure it because I have an unpopular point of view.
No, I don't think Marijuana consumption should be illegal. If I did it, even if it were legal, I would probably not particularly care to have everyone in the world know about it. That said, making Marijuana legal will do little for the black community. The problems are much deeper.
Bringing up a 300+ year long struggle against oppression isn't exactly a point in your favor of having no privacy.
One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as follows:
Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?
I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else would either).
tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our lack of influence is privacy.
Things, like say, recording the religion of someone in an open, embracing and understanding society that has full religious freedom, so you understand what your population identifies seems harmless, right?
It certainly seemed like it to the Jews in the Netherlands in the 1930s.
If an evil dictator wants to get you, he will get you, with or without a census available. There are countless other ways for him to explore. Shutting down every possible avenue of global optimization because it relies on knowing stuff about people is not a way to run a civilization.
The only insurance against unrestrained power for anyone's future is restraining the power, not privacy. Privacy is what you resort to when all else fails, which even then is clearly not enough for everyone.
Sure, that hypothetical would be great for _you_ (you being the decider of morality) - but what about everyone else living in the world? It is fundamentally impossible for a world to exist where your hypothetical can be true for everyone.
Consider this - the hypothetical you describe is currently true for some set of people. And yet it ruins lives and causes misery for millions of others.
There are a couple ways to give us that world: free markets for law, voluntarism, or to a significantly less extreme, smaller federal governments and more influential, perhaps larger local governments, for which you have a significantly greater say in making law. Other patches to the problem of shitty law include greater accountability of elected (politicians) and appointed officials (i.e. police, bureaucrats). These are only the proposals off the top of my head, but already, in the process of tackling this problem, many other problems dissipate for free.
The minute you declare privacy enforcement a greater problem than fair law-making and fair law enforcement, you've started a losing game for which the oppressors (the ones you're using privacy as a defense against) have already won.
Societies rely on privacy to limit the intrusion of others into our lives. It becomes really easy to avoid enforcing a law when you can't see it happening.
For example, without privacy, sodomy laws become much easier to enforce. No longer would it be 2 closeted gay men living together happily, it would be acceptable for the government to setup a mobile array and detect that the two men were sharing a single bed, and then charge them with sodomy.
Another example. In New Zealand, prostitution is legal. However, income information and receipts are private between the business and the tax department. Visiting a prostitute is generally frowned upon publicly. So, what happens when all prostitutes are "outed", and their customer lists published? Is that a good thing? Is it just another way of making the job illegal again, with all of the societal ills that making it legal was intended to avoid?
For a US example, imagine publishing the health records from Planned Parenthood clinics - any and all. Venereal disease, birth control, abortion, anything.
I don't see how we can prevent intrusion of individuals and governments into private areas of life without a definition and expectation of privacy. Particularly when there are differing opinions on morality and what the government should do to enforce it.
And this is fucking up things big time on this planet, and maybe it's high time for it to stop.
A lot of the problems you described have nothing to do with privacy, and are entirely because general population is bunch of hypocritical children. They get scandalized. It's a hallmark of a mature person that they don't get scandalized over things, but that they seek understanding instead.
If anything, sudden and total lack of privacy would show everyone just how hypocritical people are. How many of those against sodomy laws visit prostitutes? How many of those against prostitution are homosexual? Not saying that either is wrong - my point is that what privacy does is it creates power asymmetry. I can shame you all day long for your "sins" and you can't fight back because you don't know about mine. I'm not really convinced that the solution to this problem is more privacy.
Yes, telling people to grow up is a tall order, but I hope that as a civilization, we can reach it. And then, privacy will be something that isn't really needed much, and enforcing it only makes things less efficient.
That, and of course total impossibility of getting back the pre-industrial privacy levels while retaining XXI century technology.
I also think that a lot of the time, we willingly part with privacy (always-on syndrome), and that you can regain it pretty easily without having to fight the government - just go for a walk without your phone.
If both murder and sodomy are illegal to the eyes of the government, then wouldn't more accessible privacy protect both murderers and sodomists?
Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of, and neither do I want to be ashamed of things I do. Society's foundation is Trust, and Trust starts with Honesty. We want everyone to be as honest as possible, and we should therefore change the system to motivate honesty. Only then will we have a clear picture of reality, human nature, and problems we ought to fix.
I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality.
We lie so much that we can't imagine a world without a right to it.
Hell yes. I too want people to start treating lying with seriousness it deserves. Lying, lying, lying. It's the thing that rots and destroys our societies. I too keep repeating that civilization starts and ends with trust. Trust people have in the system, towards their leaders, and towards each other. The less trust people have, the more defensive they get, more stupid things they do, and the less efficient everything becomes.
A perfect example is the growth of various anti-science movements, anti-vaccination being a prominent case. Where do you think it comes from? Many like to say that anti-vaxxers are simply stupid, can't comprehend biology or are motivated reasoners. But the reality is simpler, and you can see it by just observing them carefully. They are normal people, like everyone else. They want to be healthy and happy. They want their children to be healthy and happy. The only real difference is that they had their trust in authority broken on a serious level. They don't trust doctors, scientific consensus and government health organizations.
Is this surprising? Frankly, no. Because all of those authorities lie. They lie fucking big, and then they lie small. Not a day goes by when we don't hear about corrupt politicians, when we don't see bullshit papers published in respected journals, when we don't learn a drug is a scam, or plain dangerous. Governments lie, and so do businesses, big and small. They lie in ads, they cheat in stores, they sell us crap - from grocery store washing stale meat in dishwasher fluid through planned obsolescence to good old lying about specs and working hard to silence disgruntled customers.
Frankly, I sometimes wonder why I still trust anyone but people I know personally. I'd like to say that it's because of education, because I can evaluate claims critically. But it's bullshit - a dedicated liar will run circles around everyone but the few smartest people. The truth is, I'm talking a calculated risk every day. And so are the anti-vaxxers. They end up hurting people. But that's not because they're evil or stupid. It's because they've broken under the avalanche of lies.
That's wonderfully magnanimous of you. But do you think it's reasonable to expect all your fellow citizens to hold that same conviction? Just because you value things that way, doesn't make it applicable to everyone. What I hear you saying is that if everyone would just conform to your worldview, you'd have a much easier time living in it. Or do you think that your view is universal already?
Also, privacy isn't a citizen vs government thing. Privacy is an expression of the power that every individual holds in every interpersonal relationship: the choice to share with or withhold information from another. And that is a personal choice.
Ideologies like "you should not judge" are at least as old as the Bible, yet we still haven't overcome it. In fact, judging from most Twitter stories I hear of (or 4chan/reddit subcultures), I'd say we have seriously regressed as a society in that matter. Please have a solution for solving hate campaigns and other forms of harassment first, before suggesting that we remove discretionary power from every individual.
I'm working this exact problem right now and would love your input. Email me at sunny.gonna at google's mail service.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the internet because we should have nothing to hide?
Unfortunately, society is currently built in a way that coerces me into keeping secrets (i.e., private key encryption, credit card number, ridiculous laws everybody breaks because privacy makes it easy to conceal). I would much rather live in a society that's built in a way that I can be honest about myself and not lose everything in exchange.
There is no debate that one needs to keep some secrets in today's society, but unlike most of you I believe this to be a necessary evil due to the current nature of the system, not something we should strive for in the long term by making privacy more accessible.
If no one had to be punished under unjust laws for living a decent life transparently, why would privacy be beneficial?
I think you have that backwards. Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on.
Can we build systems and processes that can protect that information from all known incentives and motivations (both commercial and socially driven). And accommodate for all unforeseen ones, in a society that already doesn't have a single set of harmonious goals?
Then that means he has it right and you might have it backwards: the problems are the massive amount of failure states for which privacy is a protection.
I've tried to put together a smartphone that simply gives me the choice: Control over my own data. It seems nearly impossible without a large investment.
On the other hand, you hurt yourself the most. You don't seem to realize that you're rejecting all social interactions that lead us where we are today. You'd rather live alone in the mountains, isolated from evil people like me that want to capture your information. You fund Kickstarter campaigns that build devices and network that willingly gets rid of everything that makes them valuable. And you don't even realize that's a problem.
What I see is a group of people that are scared. Afraid to take risks. You pick the blue pill, hoping to reduce potential losses while completely ignoring all of the gains the red pill would make possible. I can't blame you, loss aversion is a bitch that drives you blind.
But should I have the right not to tell you about myself?
For that matter, do you have the right not to tell me your credit card number and expiration date?
http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...
Also are you really advocating only one line of defense against unchecked power? "Just trust that people with power won't abuse it" isn't good enough and it's never going to be, but that's what you're advocating.
On the other hand: I can't remember the title/author but there has absolutely been the argument floating around for a while that the problem isn't the lack of privacy it's the asymmetry of power combined with asymmetry of privacy.
If Fred goes to a certain three websites fairly regularly, and Joe (a bad guy, thug, gangster, terrorist) also goes to those three websites fairly regularly, some other authority monitoring Fred's traffic could say,"Hey, this Fred guy is following the same patterns as this other bad guy Joe, so we should probably intercept this guy and tell him we're worried he will fall into the same trap as bad guy Joe."
Who let this powerful entity exist in the first place?
https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...
Here is their white-paper: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf
I am a bit skeptical on anything with blockchain in the synopsis these days.
